6/17/18

Well, it has been 2 1/2 months in the making. But today, Halberd has reached its first milestone!

Video captions can't really convey how happy I am to see this happen. I've been thinking about Halberd for years now, and it's great seeing it take its first step.

Granted, I still have massive amounts of work to do, but this still feels special regardless.

MVP, or Not?

One thing that I've been struggling with is figuring out what an MVP actually looks like, in the context of an RPG engine. What features are required for such a tool to become 'viable'? Where do I draw the line between wants and needs? I've generally tried to stick to as minimal a definition as possible, but such a definition is probably not what a user would actually expect. It's a tough balance.

In the end, I've decided to go with a little cop-out: The next milestone is what I'm referring to as my 'AMVP' (Absolute Minimum Viable Product), and the next one is the 'True MVP', with additional features and polish that your average user would likely expect as their minimum. I'm still figuring out the details of the latter, but my current benchmark is Dragon Quest 1 (a.k.a. Dragon Warrior). If Halberd can do everything that game can (minus some polish and a few of the more specific features like torches), then I feel like I can more confidently proclaim Halberd to be a viable (if bare-bones) engine.

After that? Who knows! Once Halberd has reached a usable state, a lot of potential avenues will be open to me. I'm probably going to keep finding progressively more varied and complex games to compare against, and mix those features with quality of life updates.